Step Up Revolution (2012)

You know the world’s gone to shit when these movies are having their own Occupy Movement.

In this 4th, and hopefully, final chapter of the Step Up series, childhood friends Sean (Ryan Guzman) and Eddy (Misha Gabriel) work as waiters at Miami Beach’s posh Dimont Hotel, owned by ruthless developer Bill Anderson (Peter Gallagher). But in their off‐duty hours, the duo leads a renegade crew known as “The Mob,” a group of cutting‐edge dancers that somehow find their ways of being tangle with Anderson’s daughter Emily (Kathryn McCormick), a very gifted dancer in her own right.

In all honesty, I don’t know if I was under the influence of some insane-o drugs, just got laid an hour beforehand, or AMC spiked my popcorn with some crazy butter, but I actually enjoyed the last Step Up flick, Step Up 3D. So I think that’s why I went into this flick with the same expectations I had with that one: some cool dancing, great use of 3D, and a terrible story. Problem is, except for the latter, this film didn’t have any of that.

Now, when you go into a film like this you can’t really expect there to be anything new or original that you haven’t seen before when it comes to it’s story, but you have to expect that when it comes to the one element that these movies are mostly known for: it’s dancing. The dancing, at times, can look pretty cool but the 3D is not used very well and even the dances themselves, just come off as totally random and annoying by how tight some of the dance moves these people perform look. Yeah, there’s some cool things to look at here and there, (a dance sequence in a National Arts Museum was a stand-out in my opinion), but nothing that got me going “oh shiiiiiit, look at that right there!!”. I said that plenty of times with the last film and found a lot of the dances to be just straight-up, dance-battles, but everything he was just stupid flash-mobs that I get bored of watching on YouTube after the first minute.

Director Scott Speer is making his feature-film debut after doing a whole bunch of music videos and I’m really starting to wonder what his favorite type of music even is. The reason I ask that is because all of the tracks here are that annoying and loud, dubstep shit that I know is so freakin’ popular amongst the young lings out there, but it just kept bothering me every time these characters dance to it. The music should have just been straight-up, classy hip-hop that would have everybody in the theater dancing but when you depend on tracks from the likes of Skrillex, Ricky Luna, and Nick Thayer to do so, you can’t really expect much of a movement from the crowd. Maybe if they were giving out free Ecstasy at my screening, then it would have been a different story but sadly, that wasn’t the case.

And of course, the real reason why this flick sucks so terribly bad, is mainly because of the shitty script. Yeah, the scripts for these types of movies aren’t really supposed to be any type of Oscar-winning material that has me re-thinking my life, days after I’ve seen it but the lines here are so terribly cheesy, that almost everybody in the theater (including myself) just scoffed at. There was this one line that was probably in the trailer but it went along the lines of “Enough with performance art, it’s time for protest art”. Haha yes, I am dead serious. That is actually one of the lines in this Step Up movie that just goes to show you that even these guys can make their own type of Occupy movement. Even if that Occupy movement is just all about them dancing around in colorful sequences.

The cast, as you would expect, don’t really do much either. Ryan Guzman seems like he has a likable charm to him somewhere underneath all of those sexy-ass dance moves, but we never find them at all here because he’s just a cardboard cut-out of what the director probably thought was the next Channing Tatum. Speaking of Tatum, he probably would have made this movie so much better just by him showing up and doing a little dance, but yes, even he is too good for this kind of material. Kathryn McCormick is very good-looking and also has some sexy dance moves as Emily, but she’s just as bland as her co-star, which makes them a pretty painful pair to watch. Peter Gallagher plays up the role of strangely corrupt daddy here very well, but seriously, why the hell did he ever choose this piece of garbage? Those eye-brows may be menacing, even still to this day, but he’s in the wrong film to utilize them to his advantage.

Consensus: Bland, corny, boring, and painful to watch at times, Step Up Revolution may be the worst of the Step Up series, which in it’s own right, really isn’t saying much but that doesn’t make it any better in it’s own right.

1.5/10=Crapola With A Beat!!